Barry Caswell, Bush Daniel
UCL Inst of Cognitive Neuroscience, London, UK.
Neural Syst Circuits. 2012 May 30;2(1):6. doi: 10.1186/2042-1001-2-6.
Since their discovery, the strikingly regular and spatially stable firing of entorhinal grid cells has attracted the attention of experimentalists and theoreticians alike. The bulk of this work has focused either on the assumption that the principal role of grid cells is to support path integration or the extent to which their multiple firing locations can drive the sparse activity of hippocampal place cells. Here, we propose that grid cells are best understood as part of a network that combines self-motion and environmental cues to accurately track an animal's location in space. Furthermore, that grid cells - more so than place cells - efficiently encode self-location in allocentric coordinates. Finally, that the regular structure of grid firing fields represents information about the relative structure of space and, as such, may be used to guide goal directed navigation.
自发现以来，内嗅皮层网格细胞显著规则且空间稳定的放电活动吸引了实验学家和理论家的关注。这项工作大多集中在以下两种假设上：一是网格细胞的主要作用是支持路径整合；二是其多个放电位置能够驱动海马体位置细胞稀疏活动的程度。在此，我们提出，网格细胞最好被理解为一个网络的一部分，该网络结合自身运动和环境线索来精确追踪动物在空间中的位置。此外，相较于位置细胞，网格细胞能更有效地以空间坐标编码自身位置。最后，网格放电场的规则结构代表了有关空间相对结构的信息，因此可用于引导目标导向的导航。
